Secondary navigation

One autumn morning in 1998, a soft-spoken, ruddy-faced petroleum engineer named Dennis Phelps walked out of his office at the Atlantic Richfield Company in downtown Midland and drove a company car, a four-door Chevrolet, to M. T. Boultinghouse 11-7, an oil well that had just been drilled amid some cactus and a few scraggly mesquite trees twenty miles south of the city’s airport.

The Alamo has a claim to being not only the most resonant historical site in America but the most peculiar. Generations of visitors have stood in front of the old mission church in downtown San Antonio and scratched their head in confusion. For one thing, the Alamo itself seems far too small to support the unbounded legend that has grown up around it. The towering building that most people expect to see turns out to be a squat and oddly configured structure that is in almost every way inscrutable.

Colt McCoy’s finely tuned, defense-destroying brain is still trying to process the events of January 7, 2010. “I knew it was going to be a great night,” Colt says. “And then it’s over, in one little hit.” Colt and his dad, Brad, whom Longhorns fans know as his ever-vigilant high school coach, are back in the McCoys’ adopted hometown of Tuscola. They’re sitting at a long table in an old hotel that a friend has recently converted into an office. Both men appear friendly and solicitous, if slightly guarded.

He stands at the lip of the bowl, which looks like a giant, empty swimming pool, and gazes at the brand-new concrete. He plops down his skateboard and sets his left foot on top of it, rolling it back and forth a few times near the edge. Except for his blue jeans, he’s wearing all black—shoes, T-shirt, cap—and looks like any other skinny ten-year-old, except for the hospital band on his right wrist.

A few minutes after two-thirty on the morning of November 18, the bottom stack of the Texas A&M bonfire began to groan and creak like a door opening in a horror movie. The 18-foot logs, which were wired together so that they stood perpendicular to the ground around the base of a towering center pole, started to lean slowly to the southeast. Above this base rose three more perpendicular stacks, stair-stepped to make the entire 59-foot structure resemble a wedding cake.

Otis Crater was late for the fanciers’ organizational meeting at the Cherokee Lounge for good reason. He had just stabbed a U-Totem attendant following a discussion of the economic impact of a five-cent price increase on a six-pack of beer.

We may never know exactly what was in Lisa Marie Nowak’s heart—what she thought, felt, believed, or dreamed. How desperately she loved or how compulsively she hated. Or why she would do something, entirely of her own free will, that was guaranteed to ruin the extraordinary life she had spent 43 years meticulously crafting. Maybe someday she’ll write a memoir or, sunk in shame and isolation, sell her story to Hollywood and offer up her social and professional suicide for money and another kind of fame.

It is a fine, sunny mid-april morning in South Texas. The weather has been unusually cool and rainy, and the spacious, pool-table-flat wedge of land between the Nueces River and the Mexican border—which the Spanish once called El Desierto de los Muertos—today looks as green as Ireland. I am in a pickup, bouncing through a pasture on the 237,348-acre Norias division of the King Ranch, one of four massive chunks of land that make up the 825,000- acre (1,300-square-mile) spread.

Compared with the glistening two-story mansions that surrounded it, the house looked like something from another time. It was only 2,180 square feet. Its redbrick exterior was crumbling, and its gutters were clogged with leaves. Faded, paint-chipped blinds sagged behind the front windows. Next to the concrete steps leading to the front door, a scraggly banana plant clung to life.

It is easier to understand the destruction of a human body than the destruction of a city. To fully comprehend a town in ruins, you need a before-and- after shot, some solid reference to what was once there. Or at least a tour guide, someone to walk you through the remains of a neighborhood and tell you how tall the buildings used to be, who lived there, where they worked, and where their kids played.